My friend I think is a problem with your code, look, my advice is for you to get a 4.4 version of android and run the inspect devices on google chrome because you will see all errors, It could be your missing a dependency something else so since this is very frustrating at the begging you should do this.
get here on the screen shoot
then you will see this if you phone is android 4.4 and api 19, less than that wont show up here, and when you do ionic run android, turn off all your emulators and the app will be install and show something like this
click inspect and the is a debugger like the developers tools from chrome or firebug from firefox
How you debug it? I had one 4.2 and I could no find another solution to debug it, then I upgrade to another phone to use the google debugger like I show on the screenshots
Seems like you just need to add <access origin="*"> to the config.xml file. I am using this without issue with Cordova 5.0 without the whitelist plugin.
i guess the correct answer is posted by @bengtler since The whitelist code was moved out of core Cordova and into a new Cordova whitelist plugin check this article : Cordova newsflash
Also i recommend anyone to check the response using postman " A chrome REST client " to see if the endPoint is actually return any data.